Critical Disciplinarity Revisited

James Chandler

                                                                          

1. Specific Intellectuals

Twenty years ago, for its thirtieth anniversary issue, I compared the early history of Critical Inquiry to that of the humanities-centers movement. I noted that both had their take-off in the 1970s and that each involved a distinctive way addressing certain contemporary issues with disciplines in the humanities and human sciences. I invoked Michel Foucault’s mid-1977 discussion of how, over the course of his own lifetime, a major shift had taken place in the role of intellectuals in modern society, how the figure of the universal intellectual had been superseded by that of the specific intellectual. The universal intellectual emerged in the course of eighteenth-century political struggles in Europe. This figure was “the man of justice, the man of law”—Foucault’s language is relentlessly masculinist—who “counterposes to power, despotism, and the arrogance of wealth the universality of justice and the equity of an ideal law.” Such efforts were made in behalf of a concept of right that, Foucault says, “can and must be applied universally.” The specific intellectual is a figure is of much more recent emergence, roughly “since the Second World War.”[1]

Where the universal intellectual “derived from the jurist or notable,” the specific intellectual derives “from the savant or expert” (“TP,” p. 128). For specific intellectuals, what Foucault calls the mode of connection between theory and practice is worked out not by way of “the just-and-true-for-all” but rather within “specific sectors, at the pressure points where their own condition of life and work situate them” (“TP,” p. 126). Further, the universal intellectual “finds his fullest manifestation in the writer” (“TP,” p. 128). The specific individual may write, of course, but writing is a different sort of affair in this case. The specific intellectual is not “the bearer of values and significations in which all can recognise themselves” but the holder of specialized knowledge acquired in “specific sectors” of disciplinary practice (“TP,” p. 128). Foucault goes so far as to claim that “the whole relentless theorization of writing in the 1960s was doubtless only a swansong” (“TP,” p. 127). For him, the fact that this theorization took its bearing in specific disciplines, and “needed scientific credentials founded in linguistics, semiology, and psychoanalysis,” was only so much further proof “that the activity of the writer was no longer at the focus of things” (“TP,” p. 127).

Yet even as writing, taken to be “the sacralizing mark of the intellectual,” has disappeared,” Foucault explains, “it has become possible on this account to develop lateral connections across different forms of knowledge” (“TP,” p. 127). This recent shift carries decided implications for the university: It explains two developments in particular: not only why, “even as the writer tends to disappear as a figurehead, the university and the academic emerge, if not as principal elements, at least as ‘exchangers,’ privileged points of intersection,” but also why “universities and education” had already by the mid-1970s become “politically ultrasensitive.” In respect to what he calls the “crisis of the universities” in that moment, Foucault nonetheless advises that it “should not be interpreted as a loss of power, but on the contrary as a multiplication and reinforcement of their power-effects as centres of a polymorphous ensemble of intellectuals who…relate themselves to the academic system” (“TP,” p. 127).

My thought in 2004 was that Foucault’s account of the academic order of things in the mid-seventies captured something important about how, in these circumstances, newly forming humanities centers became sites of exchange and points of intersection. By way of parallel, I suggested that the founding of Critical Inquiry at Chicago in that period might also be understood to answer to the situation Foucault sketches. CI was conceived neither as a public journal in which writers engage readerships in the fashion of universal intellectuals—not, say, as a “review of books”—nor, pointedly, as a journal that took its cue from the “relentless theorization of writing” on the Continent in the previous decades. Indeed, CI did not at the outset appear to be terribly invested in Continental theory at all, though this changed over the years. It was founded as a scholarly journal, but it did not restrict itself to any of the relevant scholarly disciplines that it relied on.  In introducing the first issue, founding editor Sheldon Sacks explicitly eschewed terms like “interdisciplinary” and “comparative” but still made it abundantly clear how the mission of CI embraced multiple disciplinary perspectives even as it maintained its status as an academic rather than a public enterprise: “The literary critic who has no interest in E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, the music critic who found Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure irrelevant, the art critic who would simply be bored by Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism or Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism were not our potential readers, nor were meant to be.” The journal has from the start been pitched to a readership of “savants,” in Foucault’s terms, expert in at least one discipline but open to reading in others.

It is even truer now than it was in 2004 that CI has made good on its mission to be a venue of exchange and intersection among the disciplines, even as it has extended the number and scope of the disciplines it has engaged. Founded largely in an English department, led largely by editors with that affiliation, it has nonetheless steadily broadened its editorial staff into a host of other fields, and its published offerings have broadened accordingly. In this broadening, moreover, it has continued to reestablish the ever-altering balance between a respect for what disciplines have to offer and an effort to develop modes of presentation that can move across them. In its pursuit of this mission, the journal has clearly aspired to make itself a desirable place—the desirable place—for individual scholars to publish work across disciplines in a variety of formats:  articles, essays, occasional pieces, and, more recently, book reviews and blog posts. But a second dimension of CI’s developing practice over the decades brings it perhaps closer to the humanities-center movement, a succession of more ambitious initiatives that tend to be project-based, collaborative, and reflective about our ongoing disciplinary arrangements.

Tom Mitchell organized an early cluster of these cross-disciplinary conferences and special issues:  On Narrative and The Politics of Interpretation are two that come to mind. But later years saw many others, among them Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s timely special issue on “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Hilary Chute and Patrick Jagoda’s volume on Comics & Media, and a series of major projects by the late Lauren Berlant, including Intimacy, On the Case, and, with Sianne Ngai, Comedy Has Issues. An especially wide range of disciplinary perspectives were mobilized for Around 1948 (a special issue address to the post-War situation targeted by Foucault), which began its life as a conference at the Franke Institute for the Humanities organized by Deborah Nelson, Lisa Wedeen, and James Sparrow. For the reasons I have sketched, The Franke Institute and Critical Inquiry have made for excellent mutual collaboration. I myself have been involved in a trilogy of such projects at CI, all connected to major conferences at Chicago—Questions of Evidence (with Arnold Davidson and Harry Harootunian), Arts of Transmission (with Davidson and Adrian Johns), and The Fate of Disciplines (with Davidson). The second and third of these emerged from conferences organized through the Franke Institute. The third, which doubled as annual international conference of CHCI (Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes), was in fact designed to engage the agenda laid out at the end of my thirtieth-anniversary reflections on “critical disciplinarity,” addressing head-on the kinds of issues Foucault raised in his commentary on universal and specific intellectuals. I’m sure I speak for many colleagues involved in these many projects and special publications over fifty years, that CI was been the best of possible venues for them and its editors the best of partners.

2. Oppenheimer

Back in 1977, when Foucault explained the eclipse of the universal intellectual by the specific intellectual, he had names in view. The prototype of the universal intellectual turns out to be Voltaire. (Sartre, according to Foucault, was the last of them.) As for the specific intellectual, Foucault pointed to J. Robert Oppenheimer, a name now very much back in circulation after the release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic this summer. To be more precise, however, Oppenheimer figures in Foucault’s account as a pivotal figure, one who could become “the point of transition” between universal and specific intellectuals because of two important circumstances (“TP,” p. 127). On the one hand, Oppenheimer was positioned make his public intervention on the issue of nuclear-weapons proliferation after the war “because he had a direct and localized relation to scientific knowledge and institutions” (“TP,” p. 128). On the other, “since the nuclear threat affected the whole human race and the fate of the world, his discourse could at the same time be the discourse of the universal” (“TP,” p. 128). The upshot, for Foucault, is a development he takes to be historically unprecedented for “Western intellectuals”: “For the first time the intellectual was hounded by political powers, no longer on account of a general discourse which he conducted, but because of the knowledge at his disposal” (“TP,” p. 128). In Nolan’s Oppenheimer, this hounding, with Lewis Strauss (played brilliantly by Robert Downey, Jr.) as its driver, becomes the retrospective frame of reference for the narration of remarkable career.

Nolan’s film is not, of course, the first popular account of that career. It was adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), and that book itself frequently cites testimony from an earlier film treatment, Jon Else’s 1982 competent documentary, The Day after Trinity. Interestingly, all three of these works emphasize two important aspects of Oppenheimer’s career not discussed by Foucault. One is that Oppenheimer was himself very much a creature of the modern university system before being recruited to the Manhattan Project. By the early 1930s, not yet thirty himself, he had already had academic affiliations with Harvard, Cambridge, Gottingen, Leiden, Caltech, Berkeley, and The Swiss Federal Institution of Technology in Zurich. His teaching, especially at Berkeley, shaped a small generation of academic physicists in a relatively short time.

The second emphasis present in all these works, but overlooked by Foucault, is that Oppenheimer was a polymath of such prodigious capacity that all sorts of disciplinary paths lay open to him in his precocious early years. He commanded five languages beyond English and read deeply in French, German, and Sanskrit. He had serious investments in poetry. Oppenheimer’s scholarly commitments beyond physics are certainly suggested in Nolan’s film, but they are even more fully elaborated in the Bird-Sherwin biography, which goes so far as to speculate that Oppenheimer recovered from a serious psychological crisis in 1926 by reading Proust’s seven-volume À la recherche du temps perdus in the original French while on vacation in Corsica. Else’s documentary, for its part, registers Oppenheimer’s prodigious intellectual versatility not least in extensive commentary by his intimate friend Francis Fergusson, himself a distinguished literary critic (though no relation, of course, to the distinguished literary critic who just stepped down as CI’s editor). Another literary colleague and friend of Oppenheimer, Berkeley French scholar Haakon Chevalier, who figures prominently in Nolan’s film, attests in Else’s documentary that Oppenheimer read all three volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital in German on a train trip from California to New York City.

The best short piece I’ve read about Oppenheimer is Freeman Dyson’s chapter in The Scientist as Rebel (2006), “Oppenheimer as Scientist, Administrator, and Poet.” In science, Dyson thinks Oppenheimer’s most important work was a 1938 article detailing the formation of black holes, a topic in which Oppenheimer lost interest, Dyson speculates, because the Blitzkrieg and the invitation to lead the Manhattan Project came so quickly on its heels. In poetry, Dyson shows Oppenheimer to be a talented parodist of T. S. Eliot, and in “Crossing,” his 1928 publication in the Harvard Review, a creditable craftsman of neoromantic verses in his own right. In administration, perhaps most surprisingly, Dyson emphasizes Oppenheimer’s competencies less by pointing to the Manhattan Project than by noting his command of academic matters far afield of physics–this by way an anecdote Dyson had been told by a colleague at Princeton’s Institute for Advance Study to whom Oppenheimer offered advice about a raft of British applications submitted in 1948:

Ummm . . . indigenous American music—Roy Harris is the person for him. . . . Roy was at Stanford last year but he’s just moved to the Peabody Teachers College of Nashville. . . . Symbolic logic, that’s Harvard, Princeton, Chicago or Berkeley. Ha! your field, 18^th-century English Lit. Yale is an obvious choice [Oppenheimer had already commented on “Tinker and Pottle” as authorities in that field at Yale], but don’t rule out Bate at Harvard. He’s a youngster but a person to be reckoned with.[2]

Dyson’s informant reports that he spent an hour like this listening to Oppenheimer commenting on some sixty applications across disciplines. Dyson also tells of a dinner party where Oppenheimer began reading metaphysical poetry to a prominent strategist of the Cold War, announcing that “we’ve got to see that George Kennan reads George Herbert.”[3]

In light of Foucault’s account of the twentieth-century university as a site of exchange and intersection among disciplines, it is strange that he does nothing to link Oppenheimer’s remarkable breadth of knowledge to the pivotal role he plays in the story of modern intellectuals—he does not even comment on Oppenheimer’s wide range of disciplinary pursuits. Nor does he speculate, as do the authors of American Prometheus, how such pursuits might have positioned Oppenheimer to think differently about physics and its place in the world—differently from, say, a notoriously specialized mind like that of a distinguished contemporary like British physicist Paul Dirac. To this point, Bird and Merwin relate an exchange between the two scientists in Gottingen in which Dirac, after being read Dante aloud in Italian by Oppenheimer, is supposed to have responded: “Why do you waste time on such trash?”[4]

Might we be in a better position to consider such questions now than Foucault was a half-century ago? Needless to say, the Science-Humanities debate has been with us at least since modern science began to assume its still recognizable disciplinary identity around 1800—a development about which Foucault himself wrote extensively. The famous novel Mary Shelley subtitled The Modern Prometheus was very much an early contribution to this debate. Yet these past fifty have witnessed major new developments in how this debate is framed. Consider the emergence of “science studies,” a field whose relation to the history of science was the subject of a brilliant Shakespearean allegory by Lorraine Daston in The Fate of Disciplines. Such developments have been accompanied by increasingly ambitious crossings from the humanities to the more distant natural science disciplines. These crossings have been undertaken not least, more and more, in the pages of Critical Inquiry. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History:  Four Theses” is just one of its recent influential publications in this register. Some of the debates about Oppenheimer provoked by Nolan’s film are likely to turn on questions about if and how the scientist’s serious engagement with the humanities mattered to the shape of his major work and fateful decisions he took, early and late in his life. I hope that Critical Inquiry will be at the forefront of venues that host them.

A final point I wish to make about Foucault’s commentary on Oppenheimer in relation to Nolan’s film concerns the question of the medium. Foucault might initially seem to have a laser-like focus on this question, insisting, as he does, that “writing” will no longer serve the modern intellectual as it had done since the eighteenth-century. Yet having made this declaration, he does not consider alternatives to writing as a medium but points instead to specific intellectuals’ new mode of connecting theory and practice. Indeed, Foucault shows no interest in the concept of the medium as such, though by the 1970s it was already enjoying serious conceptual elaboration. Different questions might occur to us today, after the emergence of media studies and new genres of screen practice such as the video essay. Should Else’s documentary about Oppenheimer, released just five years after Foucault’s comments, be taken as an “intellectual” intervention in debates about nuclear weaponry?  Should Nolan’s film? What would be the criteria for such judgments?

These questions could be posed about Nolan’s Oppenheimer in a little symposium that might include physicists, film scholars, political scientists, and historians. Other questions would surely follow. What should we make of the film’s representation of both the research benefits and the security risks implicit in open scientific exchange (as opposed to what in the film is called “compartmentalization”? How accurate is the film’s representation of quantum physics? How much does that question matter? Should we take Nolan’s particularly frantic scrambling of narrative sequences, or his mismatching of soundtrack and image track (the repeated thunder in the soundtrack long before the post-Trinity celebration at Los Alamos in which we actually see stomping feet that produce it) as an effort to mimic the dislocations of quantum mechanics? Should such an effect be understood to extend the film’s implicit homology between quantum physics and modernist works by Picasso, Stravinsky, and T. S. Eliot it shows Oppenheimer engaging? Does the melodramatic villainy of Downey’s Strauss, shown ruthlessly sacrificing Oppenheimer’s reputation to serve his own personal ambition, function as Nolan’s tactical compensation for the ethical quandaries attendant on the Manhattan Project and its aftermath? Why does Nolan not emphasize, as Else’s documentary does, the instrumentalist momentum that led Oppenheimer and his team at Los Alamos to carry on to its horrendous conclusion, months after V-E Day, a project launched to defeat Nazi Germany? How does the film represent the dissenting “Chicago Petition” in this debate about the use of the bomb? Is that representation accurate? Why does the film dwell on various scientists’ differing approaches to the spectacle of the Trinity test? How does that matter to the film’s own many spectacular effects? And what about the representation of “writing” in the film, including the Sanskrit text that plays a role in a curious early sex scene between Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh)?  

In my little fantasy of this collaborative project, then, it would begin as a conference organized at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, with its proceedings published in a special issue of Critical Inquiry.  For all I know, however, Bill Brown, Heather Keenleyside, and Richard Neer already have such a project in the works. No, on second thought, I’m sure they are dreaming up a far more interesting collaboration between Critical Inquiry and The Franke Institute, and I wish them all the best with it.

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James Chandler is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and interim chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts (2022). He serves on the advisory board of CI, has published many essays and reviews in its pages, and has edited several of the journal’s special issues.

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[1] Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon et al., ed. Gordon (New York, 1980), pp. 126, 127; hereafter abbreviated “TP.”

[2] Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel (New York, 2006), p. 233.

[3] Ibid., p. 233.

[4] Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), p. 62.

Blind Spots

Harry Harootunian

I served on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry for about ten of the fifty years now being commemorated. For me the time spent represented an ongoing education, a virtual work in progress, in disciplines, idea, and cultural and literary theories that have since become part of my own work. The experience at CI distilled for me what I believe was the distinctive critical essence of the University Chicago, which I will always cherish. As the lone historian and Asianist among specialists in literature, the experience of reading articles in fields beyond my specialty, which often seemed exotic, and discussing them brought me be back to the regions that formed my earlier education. Above all else, I learned more than I can say or repay, but principally how the appeal to specialization began to look like an enclosed space with no exit to the wider world.

In my time at CI I had the opportunity to begin writing some pieces that were unrelated to the world of my research, occasioned by the growing interest in colonial discourse and its consequences initiated by Edward Said. I would like to say here that in these articles it eventually occurred to me that I hadn’t gone far enough, that I was blindsided, perhaps, by theory itself. Even though the promise of theory is to shed new light on familiar things, sometimes the light is dimmed and we’re thrown into making our way in the dark. A recent article in the Washington Post reminded me of this defect, as well as the way some things never change. The article reported the plight of the Armenian minority in Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic enclave of indigenous Armenians surrounded by a sizeable Azerbaijani military, employed to cut off the community from road contact with Armenia. The dire situation is the result of a conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the most recent in several wars after the fall of the Soviet Union. An oil rich Azerbaijan won in this round of the struggle, armed with the most advanced weapons bought from Turkiye and Israel, which should have known better. Israelis could not have been ignorant of where the weapons would be used; Turkiye was already practiced in the genocidal vocation from their near attempt to exterminate the entire population of Armenians in Anatolia in 1915-16, which makes both states complicit in Azerbaijani ‘s attempt to starve the citizens of the enclave by blockading access to food and other necessities. Extermination by starvation qualifies as genocidal intent.

Here we have an illustration of how colonialism works to eliminate indigenous populations. What has not been recognized in this familiar story is how colonizing domination invariably leads to unspeakable oppression, usually of a minority, whether Armenians, Irish, Native Americans, Ainu, or other, now identified as indigenous, through diminishing their means of subsistence, expropriation of land, theft, dispossession, and degradation ending in mass murder. It does not matter if the colonizer is a precapitalist conquest dynasty or settlers, it comes down to the same terrible conclusion, which Marx described as the “slaughter of the innocents” augmented by the agency of “so-called primitive accumulation.” This knotting of colonialism combined with expropriation and dispossession disclosed the kinship among the dominated indigenous peoples who have been forced to undergo their systematic elimination. The great French poet Aimé Césaire had Africa in mind when he accused Europeans of accumulating the “highest heap of Corpses in history.” But it needs to be said that the misrecognition of theory has inadvertently played a damaging role in reshaping this narrative. While the momentary theorization of post-coloniality contributed to sensitizing us to the ill-effects of colonial domination, it also worked to displace the denialism associated with colonization as the scene of genocidal excess by avoiding it. Instead of confronting the destructive outcome of political oppression and massive material expropriation of the everyday lives of indigenous minorities, it diverted attention to the cultural and psychological encounter, which, in some cases, inspired historians to extol empires for their ethnic multi-diversity. This approach turned to a preoccupation with subjectivity, worrying  whether the subaltern could speak (when did they cease to speak?) rather than live, through the promotion of categories like negotiation and the coming together of shared subjectivities, fantasies conjured in the afterlife disappointments of new nations accompanied by failure to see colonization’s aptitude for exploitation, dispossession, and genocide, which resulted in concealing its shared resemblance to the horrors of primitive accumulation. Here, in the twenty-first century, we continue to face the figure of genocidal extermination and its enabling desire, living the present as if it was still the unfinished past. The writer Jenny Erpenbeck rightly asked “is memory an instrument of power” and answered “perhaps,” then added: “How far do you have to step back in order to see the entire historic tapestry extending far beyond your own lifetime? How much do you have to know in order to understand what it really is that’s flourishing in your own blind spot?”

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Harry Harootunian is the Max Palevsky Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Chicago. He was a coeditor of Critical Inquiry and is now on the editorial board.

A Lesson in Kindness

Thomas Pavel 

The Critical Inquiry essay that helped me most was Badiou’s Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology (2011), coauthored by our former colleague David Nirenberg, intellectual historian, and his father, Ricardo L. Nirenberg, mathematician and writer.

David Nirenberg and Ricardo L. Nirenberg

 The topic of this essay was French philosopher Alain Badiou’s use of interdisciplinary arguments to reach unexpected, stunning conclusions. Badiou followed the example of thinkers who, inspired by structural linguistics, asserted in the late sixties that since the human condition had ceased to be the main object of philosophy, thinkers should henceforth examine language and its networks of relevant differences. In a stronger, more radical move, in the late eighties Badiou aimed at revolutionizing ontology, the philosophical reflection on being, by identifying it with mathematics.

A simple, elementary, insight tells us that such an identification is probably mistaken. Yes, mathematics does assist natural and social sciences find simple, elegant expressions of their discoveries, provided that empirical observations confirm the predictions reached with its help. Perhaps it could also assist some branches of philosophy formulate their findings in a more rigorous way. But in the case of Badiou’s speculations, prudent insights are not decisive, given that his main theses are remarkably audacious. He states, for instance, that “Situations are nothing more, in their being, than pure multiplicity.” Using the expression “pure multiplicity,” Badiou suggests that ontological reflection should pay no attention to the differences between the beings that populate the world and to the specificity of their mutual interactions. For him, there are no modes of being. Since, moreover, Badiou asserts that this pure multiplicity is the object of set theory, he concludes, after a few intermediary steps, that “insofar as being, qua being, is nothing other than pure multiplicity, it is legitimate to say that ontology, the science of being qua being, is nothing other than mathematics itself.”

A wonderful feature of the Nirenberg paper is the generosity of their approach. Far from just exclaiming “nonsense!,” they patiently, politely, go through Badiou’s claims, explain to readers less familiar with set theory the notions and the operations he uses, and in a kind, respectful tone, indicate their inadequacy. We all are, the paper suggests, inhabitants of the Republic of Letters, a community in which intellectual errors do happen. Such errors should be calmly discussed with the help of clear, detailed arguments, rather than subjected to condemnation, exclusion, interdiction.

Thank you, Nirenberg father and son, for this important lesson.                                                                                 

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Thomas Pavel is the Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor in Romance Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, the Committee on Social Thought, and Fundamentals at the University of Chicago. He is also a member of the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.

Reading Critical Inquiry

Robert Pippin

The fiftieth anniversary of Critical Inquiry happens to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of my life as an academic philosopher in the United States. We both began in 1974, and I recall beginning to read Critical Inquiry in the UCSD library a couple of years later. It was not then, and it still is not, a journal that anglophone philosophers regularly consult, but I had been an English major in college, had made the decision to switch to philosophy relatively late, and had gone to a graduate program where I could study Greek, German, and French philosophy both historically and in their present manifestations.

I had become as familiar with Kenneth Burke, Wayne Booth, Stanley Fish, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Elder Olsen as I had started to understand Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger and their contemporary interpreters. Of course, the articles in CI largely concerned literary criticism, quickly expanded to critical thinking itself and then a “theory” of such critical thinking. But I fit uneasily into the anglophone world of analytic philosophy (which I have come to think of as more a sociological category than a philosophical one), and had come to think of philosophy as an activity not confined to academic departments of specialists, but as a mode of reflective thought that was an unavoidable aspect of any reflection about meaning and value, or any inquiry that aimed at a kind of truth not available empirically. There were of course early articles in CI by distinguished American philosophers – Nelson Goodman, Richard Wollheim, Stanley Cavell, Donald Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Max Black – but as literary theory became more self-consciously philosophical and began to occupy itself with major Continental thinkers, the “official” representatives of philosophy tended to be Europeans, Foucault, Derrida, Bruno Latour and so forth. This was certainly a reflection of the increasingly specialized and unfortunately provincial nature of the organization of knowledge in modern universities. This “silo” like organization has been especially harmful for professional philosophy as, in its isolation, it seems to me ever more uncertain about what it is and why it is important. This has sometimes produced an unhelpful arrogance. (Some philosophers believe that all other work in the humanities is a bad version of it, rather than a good version of what it is.) But CI seemed to me – remarkably – to avoid settling into any ideological niche within all these hardening divisions. That feature of the journal proved invaluable to me when I began to argue that philosophy was impoverished if philosophers believed, as they increasingly did, that philosophy was only properly available in engagements with other philosophers.  Inspired by philosophers like Cavell and George Wilson, art historians like Michael Fried, and film theorists like Victor Perkins, I wanted to make the case that art, novels and films were themselves modes of philosophical thought, not merely illustrative or provocative for philosophy. Beginning in 2002, I began having extremely helpful conversations with the editors of CI about such a possibility and published an article about abstract art (from the point of view of Hegel), in 2005 “Authenticity in Painting” about Michael Fried’s art history project, and starting in 2009 several articles on film and philosophy. I can’t imagine now being able to embark on such projects without CI. So, my somewhat personal “Happy Birthday” to the journal is a simple expression of deep gratitude.

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Robert Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is on the editorial broad of Critical Inquiry.

Critical Inquiry, Mon Amour

Stanley Fish

In this profession, you are ahead of the game if you have an idea. if you have an idea and a half,  you are in rarefied territory; and if you have two ideas, you are Wittgenstein. I am not Wittgenstein; I have had only one idea. It has taken various forms, but basically, the idea is that the binary distinctions within which we ordinarily reason  (objective/subjective, true/false, literal/figurative,  core/periphery, and the like) do not as we often think mark an opposition between something given and available directly—the bare facts, the minimal linguistic meaning of a text, the bottom line—and something mediated, secondary, derivative, added, suspect. Rather, in each opposition both poles emerge within the medium (mediation) of assumptions, presuppositions, settled practices, long-established institutions, authoritative professions, unchallenged (but not unchallengeable) definitions, culturally privileged histories, deeply in-place goals and values—what Adorno terms the “realm of prevailing purposes.”  “Prevailing” means prevailing now, not for all time. The overarching and totalizing narrative within which we are scripted characters can and does change and the routes of possible change are included in its landscape, but for so long as the narrative and its sub-plots are relatively stable, locally or generally, judgments of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, better and worse, to the point and beside the point, real and illusory can confidently be made and supported by reasons. It is just that those reasons are reasons—have the force of reasons—by virtue of the prevailing realm within which they are intelligible and even obvious. That is, they are not just reasons, reasons that would be honored as such no matter what purposes or goals or norms are in place. They therefore have a relative status and force—relative to the status and force reasons would have if they were independent of any culturally delimited normative regime—but in the absence to us (not, presumably to God) of any such free-standing reasons, they are what we have and they are sufficient; not wholly sufficient as they would be if they could resolve matters once and for all, but sufficient to the extent that they enable us to make sense of things, if only for a while. You can always say of something that it is true or false, correct or incorrect, on target or off the map, certainly the case or certainly not the case and you can always support your judgement. What you can’t say when your judgment is challenged that it holds true in all conceivable (and presently inconceivable) alternative worlds. But we don’t live in alternative worlds. We live in this one; or, rather, in the world given to us by whatever realm of purposes currently presides over our thoughts and actions; and in that world we can at once and without contradiction affirm the antifoundationalist insight that nothing we see, say or do is tethered to a bottom-line reality and still perform in normative ways that foundationalists claim are available only if we believe as they do.

So that, in a brief, waiting-to-be-filled-in form is the idea. I am not today going to defend it or elaborate it or respond to the objections that have been brought against it or acknowledge the predecessors and contemporaries from whom I have borrowed. I want, rather, to note as a matter of personal and professional history, the centrality of Critical Inquiry to its emergence and development.  Critical Inquiry was and is the perfect venue for my ambitions by virtue of its own ambition—to present arguments that extend beyond analyses of particular texts and address themselves to the largest and most general questions one might ask: What is literature? What is a text? What, if anything, constrains interpretation?  In the ordinary course of things, these and related questions have already been answered or, to be more precise, answers to them have been presupposed, and the business of literary description, analysis, and evaluation proceeds without undue theoretical anxiety. But theoretical anxiety and theoretical controversy are what the editors of Critical Inquiry wanted to provoke from the beginning. Every essay published was an invitation to respond and the invitations were almost always accepted with the result that the traditional stand- alone essay was replaced by dialogue and by dialogue that often expanded to include more and more participants. In effect a Critical Inquiry author always entered the fray in medias res, as I did in my initial appearance in the journal’s inaugural year. The piece was titled “Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader,” and, as footnote 1 explains, I was writing in response to Rader’s response, made in Critical Inquiry and in a volume of the English Institute papers, to my first theoretical effort, “Literature in the Reader,” published in New Literary History, the other new “big idea” journal. At the time, Rader was my colleague at Berkeley, someone I played softball with, someone with whom I had a good, if not close, relationship.  And yet we went at it as if we had never met and inhabited completely different worlds. We had been transported from a shared local geography to the abstract, realm of scholarship and criticism where we jousted on invisible fields with words.

Two years later I turned on the position for which I fought so strenuously in my debate with Rader and announced my about face in, where else, Critical Inquiry.  In “Interpreting the Variorum,” I abandoned the categories of the text and the reader and introduced the concept of “interpretive community” (corresponding more or less to Adorno’s prevailing realm of purposes, Kuhn’s paradigm, Bourdieu’s habitus, Polanyi’s tacit knowledge, MacIntyre’s well developed practice, Wittgenstein’s life world), a solvent in which texts and readers were no longer independent entities with independent shapes but community entities whose shapes were extensions of the communities procedures, protocols, and values.  About this time I was moving away from literary studies and towards the law, and, as if on cue, Critical Inquiry invited me to participate in a multi-day conference featuring everyone I had ever heard of where I responded to a paper written by Ronald Dworkin, legal theory’s leading light. That first entry in the Dworkin/Fish exchange soon appeared in Critical Inquiry where readers could enjoy the spectacle (or was it a farce?) of a legal theorist doing literary criticism and a literary critic replying by doing legal theory. Four more exchanges spanning ten years followed and when it was all over I had a new career, courtesy of Critical Inquiry. (A retrospective on the Fish/ Dworkin debate is currently in press.)

With sixteen or so appearances, I took to referring to Critical Inquiry as “my publisher,” although in the past two decades my submissions have slowed. (The most recent substantive essay is “Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn’t Matter.”) Nevertheless I will always feel that the journal and I have flourished together and given the vigor and excitement its pages still breathe, I have hopes. 

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Stanley Fish is the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. He is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.

Happy Anniversary!

Catherine Malabou

Tom Mitchell once gave me a pink woolen cap as a present. It is a knitted cap, with large stitches. Maybe it’s crocheted. Its pink is comparable to the chewing gum in France called Malabar (note the phonic proximity with my name). A very soft pink. I’ve never worn it outside because it looks a bit like a ’50s swimming cap. It’s very beautiful, adorable, but a little flashy. On the other hand, I wear it at home, at my office, whenever writing seems difficult to me. This cap is like a membrane that protects my ideas, halfway between a kangaroo’s pouch (for the brain) and a robot’s or alien’s helmet. Protection is something ambiguous. I remember Aristotle stating that a shield (in Greek problema, literally “what is found ahead”) means both what guards from and what exposes to a screen and an obstacle at the same time. My cap, then, is securing my ideas but it also confronts them with the outside, the outside of the wool shelter, thus making the outside appears as an engaging thread, in all its ambiguity.

It is often suggested, in intellectual circles, that the time has come to abandon the twentieth-century formulations of a critical-theory project. A theory is critical, Horkheimer said, to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery,” acts as a “liberating . . . influence,” and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers of” human beings.[1] What remains of such a project? How is it possible, and is it possible to bring together different contemporary discourses on subalterity and regroup them under a common banner? Critical Inquiry, for me, has always been and will always be the place, the unique place for raising such questions, the place where critical theory is both challenged and maintained, preserved and transformed, undressed and reshaped.

My pink cap is the symbol of such a strange metamorphic power. Between the inside and outside of my head, opening in the intimacy of my being something like the critical zone, the biological equivalent of the exposed intimacy of the journal. Sign of hope in these dark times, promise of benevolence and rigor.

I am so happy to have published so many different articles in it, from Spinoza to reflections on neurobiological issues, up to recent explorations of political hegemonies.

From all the neural convolutions of my cap, in the name of all my “problems,” I thank you immensely, dear Tom, and extend my gratitude to all the other members of the crew.

I wish you a very happy anniversary, Critical Inquiry.

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Catherine Malabou is a professor of European languages and studies and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (2012), Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality(2016), Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains(2019), and, most recently, Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy(forthcoming). She is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.

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[1]. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (New York, 1992), p. 246.

A Critical Inquiry Education

Haun Saussy

I owe a lot of my education to the 1980s Critical Inquiry. Then as now, I was in hot pursuit of theoretical models that might collide in unexpected ways with literary texts and common sense, and thus force a rethink. The Aporia Express! So an article with the title “The Epistemology of Metaphor” (1978) interpellated me, as we used to say. I didn’t know Paul de Man, I hadn’t been in a classroom with him yet, but I tracked down the articles that would later become chapters in Allegories of Reading, for example “Political Allegory in Rousseau” (1976). They were unlike anything else I’d read, even Derrida. A problem would be stated and a quest proposed, and along the way things would start to go wrong, or as de Man once put it, to “swerve away from” the problem we had started out with. With Derrida one started off in an antagonistic position to recognized means of sense-making; de Man pulled away the magic carpet when we were already in the air. I reread those articles until the journal numbers fell apart, allegorizing the suspension of narrative continuity.

Another way Critical Inquiry shaped me was its readiness to offer space to scholars and theorists who had encountered de Man and were not having any of it. If it was a “theory journal,” it knew that “theory” thrived in a contested space. Stanley Corngold and Raymond Geuss came out waving their hammers; de Man answered them, sometimes bluntly, as exemplifying the problem he was diagnosing. In my group, a critique that claimed to know what counted as real philosophy or real literary history was considered “stupid,” as missing the point. Critical Inquiry, confident enough to print the clangor, was taking a metacritical stand or possibly a long bet.

When de Man’s second death arrived, with the ignominy of his 1940s collaborationist journalism laid bare, some made excuses; some said “no, the real point is elsewhere”; some divided early de Man from late; others gloated; some were clearly out to settle scores. The autopsy was best and most honorably carried out by Critical Inquiry, which allowed de Man’s friends and enemies to show how they dealt with the unconscionable until, in 1989, the editors declared the issue closed. A performative declaration: but what if the whole subsequent history of Critical Inquiry were a doomed attempt to close the coffin on my quondam teacher?

I learned a lot else from the journal in the ensuing years, but an occasion like this makes one look to the beginning. My first rejection slip, in 1981 or so, was from Critical Inquiry. It seems I have been living in hopes of the journal’s attention ever since.

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Haun Saussy is a coeditor of Critical Inquiry.

Fiftieth Anniversary

The fiftieth anniversary of Critical Inquiry marks more than the ongoing liveliness and longevity of one journal. It marks the ongoing importance of humanities journals tout court and the vitality of a field that persistently asks new questions and expands the borders of knowledge. As we begin our next fifty years, we remain committed to that vitality—to new authors, new research, and new conceptual paradigms that open new fields of inquiry.

Looking back at what the journal has accomplished and looking forward with undiminished aspiration, we want to express our gratitude to the University of Chicago Press and the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago for their unflagging support and to our authors (of articles, reviews, responses, and blog posts) and our readers, who so clearly justify the endeavor. In particular we’d like to celebrate the members of our coeditorial board (past and present), who sustain a dynamic, at times passionate conversation from across fields and theoretical dispositions.

To mark the occasion, we’re posting short reflections on the history and importance of the journal from members of our editorial board and from frequent contributors to the journal. Join us as we celebrate Critical Inquiry at fifty.

What we’ve posted so far:

Catharine R. Stimpson’s “The Origins of Critical Inquiry“

Michael Fried’s “HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND THANKS“

Jerome McGann’s “The Roots of Critical Inquiry”

Elizabeth Abel’s “CI Special Issues“

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “CI Moments“

Haun Saussy’s “A Critical Inquiry Education“

Catherine Malabou’s “Happy Anniversary!“

Stanley Fish’s “Critical Inquiry, Mon Amour“

Robert Pippin’s “Reading Critical Inquiry“

Thomas Pavel’s “A Lesson in Kindness“

Lorraine Daston’s “How We Know What We Know“

Harry Harootunian’s “Blind Spots“

James Chandler’s “Critical Disciplinarity Revisited“

Peter Galison’s “Inquiry, Expanded“

CI Moments

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Critical Inquiry is fifty! I am sure there have been journals that have lasted longer. But what is remarkable is that CI – not the mouthpiece of a professional association but an in-house journal run by colleagues at the University of Chicago – has managed to retain its position as a leading journal of the humanities continuously for decades. CI came into my life late. Throughout the 1970s, I trained to be a social-scientific historian of South Asia and even tried my hand at using some tools of econometrics only to realize that my passions lay elsewhere. The historian Ranajit Guha and the historiographical project named Subaltern Studies that he led through the 1980s introduced me and my cohorts to structuralism and the proverbial “linguistic turn” it inspired. But CI was not a part of my endeavors until I got my first academic position as a lecturer in Indian and Indonesian Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, towards the end of 1984 and befriended Simon During and David Bennett, colleagues in Melbourne’s English department. It was Simon who first spoke to me of the work of being published in CI, of the postcolonial criticism that Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak (whom I came to know through Subaltern Studies) spearheaded and drew my attention to the eye-opening issue of 1985 on “Race, Writing, and Difference” that Henry Louis Gates guest edited. Excited by the ideas I encountered on the pages of CI, I soon joined Simon and David in waiting with eagerness for the arrival of the latest issue of the journal in the University library.

One of the secrets of the success of CI must be that while it has always been associated with “theory,” it never espoused any particular variety of it as an orthodoxy. Its commitment was to remain a forum for discussing all issues of interest to the academic left generally. The credit for this must go to my colleagues who ran the journal and to Tom Mitchell, its longest-serving editor. These colleagues, incredible intellectuals themselves, steered the journal through the changing seas of academic fashions, especially through the stormy 1980s and ‘90s when “Theory” came to be charged with so much intellectual enthusiasm and ferment, all deployed in service of necessarily unruly and utopian desires for human futures beyond the limits of Western liberalism, colonial and racist domination, gender inequalities, and neoliberal globalization of economies and cultures.

I had the privilege of serving on the editorial committee of CI sometime in the early decades of this century, and what a privilege it was! To be in the presence of my colleagues Tom Mitchell, Bill Brown, the late Lauren Berlant, Arnold Davidson, Joel Snyder, Françoise Meltzer, Richard Neer, and Beth Helsinger discussing, debating, and evaluating a submission with no other interest in mind than a good argument, a new insight, a novel twist in thinking, was both thrilling and uplifting. It made you see in action what Hannah Arendt once famously called “the life of the mind.” These formidable intellectuals had managed, over the years, to develop a collective culture of nurturing and curating new points of view or new movements of critical thought in the humanities. There were arguments aplenty in these editorial meetings – often passionate, sometimes partisan, but seldom angry. What they looked for in every article was something new and persuasive – a new thought, a new question, a new analytical twist, something to keep the intellectual world, the world of ideas, from turning stale.

I was myself a beneficiary of this culture when I began my work on climate change that resulted in the publication in 2021 of my book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. My personal experience of some horrible Australian wildfires in 2003 stoked my early interests in the phenomenon of global warming. But unlike in the case of my other book projects, there was no model to follow for a humanist historian wanting to work on climate change. As I began to read into the scientific literature explaining the anthropogenic nature of this planetary warming and came across the idea of “the Anthropocene,” I developed a sense that scientists’ claim about human institutions and technologies having become a geological force challenged one of the most profound and dearly held assumptions of my own discipline: that human history and natural history belonged to separate realms of knowledge. Natural history, to put it in nineteenth-century terms, was the realm of necessity while human history was a realm of both necessity and freedom. Indeed, the very idea of “freedom,” I thought, was being challenged by the scientific understanding of this crisis. And as I thought through the significance of this collapsing distinction between nature and history, certain other propositions followed. The subject was huge, and I did not know how I, as someone interested in South Asian history and postcolonial theory, might handle it. I published my first speculations in the form of four theses in an essay in 2008 in a Bengali journal published from Calcutta. Unfortunately, none of my Bengali readers were interested. The experience reminded me of what my friend, the historian Greg Dening, would often say of academic writings: it was like dropping a feather into a deep well and waiting for the echoes to come back!

Completely by chance, Tom Mitchell asked me soon after this Bengali essay was published if I had something I might want to submit to the journal. I expanded my Bengali essay and wrote it up in English in the form of the same four theses I had advanced in the original. Both Tom and Bill Brown gave it a close reading. I still remember discussing a draft with Bill over cups of coffee in the University’s bookshop on Ellis. I don’t remember what I called that essay originally though it did have the expression “Four Theses” in it. I was trying to explain to Bill my argument that the science of climate change was going to change the academic climate of my own discipline when Bill made the brilliant suggestion that I call the article “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Thus was born one of the most significant essays I have written in my life. But without the title that Bill thought up for that piece, I don’t think it would have delivered any of its punches.

“The Climate of History” was a controversial essay. But CI nurtured the debate and made room for my ongoing work allowing me to develop conversations with colleagues elsewhere. One such interlocutor was Bruno Latour, a regular and esteemed contributor to the journal who, sadly, is no longer with us. When The Climate of History in a Planetary Age came out, I retained Bill’s original phrase in the title of the book, both for its pithiness and for the irrevocable connection it made between CI and my academic work at the University of Chicago.

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Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. He is also a consulting editor for Critical Inquiry. “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009) is one of the most popular essays ever published in the journal.

CI Special Issues

Elizabeth Abel

My life changed in 1979, when Tom Mitchell suddenly – inexplicably – invited me to become a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. Overwhelming as it was – I would be the only assistant professor and the only female coeditor in an august assemblage of renowned male scholars – I eventually realized that I could make a contribution by spotlighting the emergence of feminist literary criticism as an area of special interest for the journal.

Proposing a special issue of CI on feminist criticism felt audacious at the time. Committed to casting a broad net across diverse fields of inquiry, the journal had been wary of special issues. It prefaced its first exception, On Metaphor (1978), with an editorial statement attributing this anomaly to the impact of a recent symposium on metaphor at the University of Chicago. A similar logic undergirded the special issue On Narrative (1980). Venturing beyond that logic that same year, Tom Mitchell placed his editorial signature firmly on the journal with the first free-standing and explicitly transdisciplinary special issue: The Language of Images.

Granting feminism the gravitas of a special issue marked a step beyond both traditionally literary subjects (metaphor, narrative) and newly interdisciplinary ones (iconology) into a discourse that emerged from a political movement rather than an academic discipline. The exploration of sexual/textual politics was not new to Critical Inquiry, however. From its origins, the journal had included pathbreaking essays by Annette Kolodny on defining a “Feminist Literary Criticism” (1975); Catharine R. Stimpson on the mind/body problem in Gertrude Stein (1977); Carolyn G.  Heilbrun on marriage in contemporary fiction (1978); Lee Edwards on the female hero (1979); and Sandra M. Gilbert on transvestism as literary metaphor (1980).  Writing and Sexual Difference (1981) simply knotted these threads together into a broader critical fabric whose difference was announced by the bright pink cover of its publication as a book.

Writing and Sexual Difference marked a turning point in the focus of the special issues, which from that point on increasingly engaged the intersections between interpretation and politics. The very next special issue, in fact, was titled The Politics of Interpretation (1982). Dedicated to “the proposition that criticism and interpretation, the arts of explanation and understanding, have a deep and complex relation with politics, the structures of power and social value that organize human life,” that issue signaled a strong departure from the  journal’s self-description in the epigraph that topped all four issues of volume 1 (1974): “A voice for reasoned inquiry into significant creations of the human spirit.” Followed by several special issues whose political investments were explicit – Canons (1983), “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1985),  Politics & Poetic Value (1987), The Sociology of Literature (1987) – the turn to politics reached its own climactic turning point in the special issue on Identities (1992), guest edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  and Kwame Anthony Appiah. As the editors explain in their introduction:

A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. Critical Inquiry‘s contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, “Writing and Sexual Difference,” and “‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference.” In the 1990s, however, “race,” “class,” and “gender” threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of identity.

The special issues that followed – on topics ranging from “God” to “Things” to “Cases” to “Disciplines” to “Comedy” to “Intimacy” to “Pandemic” – enact the disruptions that Gates and Appiah sought.

I hope this little history offers one example of the “unpredictable spontaneity” that Sheldon Sacks celebrated in the journal’s inaugural editorial: the openness to changing intellectual and political scenarios that has kept Critical Inquiry at the forefront of critical reflection for the first half century of its existence and will hopefully keep it there for the half century to come.

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Elizabeth Abel is professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair in English at the University of California Berkeley. She is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.

The Roots of Critical Inquiry

Jerome McGann

                                          

All the instruments agree that the day of its birth was a bright warm day.  And all of us who learned to use Critical Inquiry during the next fifty years – to read it, to write for it – agree that it was a gift that keeps on giving. Perhaps I’ve been asked to testify now to that truth universally acknowledged because I am one of the few persons still around who was also there when CI was founded.

Elizabeth Helsinger was there too, and she will have a store of memories to draw on.  But Elizabeth came to Chicago in 1972, six years after I arrived and just as Shelly Sacks was beginning to lay final plans for founding the journal. So her memories might be slightly and, I’m sure, quite different from mine. 

For instance, when the first issue of Critical Inquiry was published in late 1974 I was thinking about leaving the university (in 1975 I did). It was a move I seriously did not want to make but, for personal reasons, felt I might have to. My years at Chicago had radically altered how I thought about myself as an educator and a scholar, and I was – still am – deeply committed to what happened to me there. So the first issue of CI brought my love of the university into an unusually clear – an unusually critical – focus. 

The issue featured Wayne Booth’s inquiry, commissioned by CI’s editor (Shelly Sacks), into “Kenneth Burke’s Way of Knowing.”  When the essay was sent to Burke for a “response”,  he delivered what Shelly called a  “counterblast.”  I still remember Shelly’s exact word because it so wittily echoed Burke’s first collection of essays, Counter-Statement (1931). And I recall as well how happy he was in the event.  For Shelly, Burke’s “counterblast” to Wayne’s critical inquiry completed an “exciting intellectual exchange” that he had hoped would be the hallmark of the  new journal.  More to his immediate point, it was, as he wrote in the journal’s first editorial note, a “significant commentary on how one great critic sees himself and on how he is seen by one of his most sensitive admirers.”  The exchange for Shelly was a dramatic ( = very Burkean) demonstration of intellectual perplexities abounding. Here were two serious men committed to learning about ways of knowing and who wanted to let us know – happily for us, not so happily for them – that they had a lot yet to learn.  For a reader even today, their exchange remains  provocative and enlightening in the rich sense that Burke gave to the word “negative”.[1]

Although I’m inflecting that inaugural CI event in Burkean terms, in 1974 it seemed to me, as it still seems to me, echt University of Chicago.  I see it that way because of two salient  matters of fact that are also personal matters of fact. First of all – Wayne mentions it in his essay – Burke and the “Chicago School of Criticism” had long been in spirited intellectual disputes about what the Chicago School called “Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern.”[2] As a second generation Chicago School critic, Wayne’s essay was a move to reconcile some of the differences between Chicago and Burke.  Second, the history of the relations between Burke and the Chicago School was much on my mind when I joined the UofC English faculty in 1966.

In 1961 I had written a long MA thesis at Syracuse University on the disputes between The Chicago School and the New Critics where I came down strongly on the side of New Criticism.[3] More to the point, my view was shaped almost entirely by Kenneth Burke, whose books were sacred texts for me, especially The Philosophy of Symbolic Form. Studies in Symbolic Action (1941).  Four years as a PhD student at Yale (1962-66) when The Yale School was in serious liftoff, I had made Romanticism my chief scholastic interest. But it had not changed Burke’s importance for me or my views about the special formalism of the Chicago School. So when I arrived at UofC in 1966 the book most on my mind was Burke’s Language as Symbolic Action (1966), just being published by University of California Press. 

During the next ten years at Chicago everything changed for me because I was plunged into the day-to-day context – the practical educational scene – that had shaped the approach of the Chicago School.  This was the set of first year Common Core humanities courses I was required to teach and that many of the established faculty, not least Wayne and Shelly, had been running every year for many years. It was one thing to know about Chicago’s Common Core as a set of formal approaches to the study of Great Works of Culture. It was something else again to experience it as an ongoing project of undergraduate education.

When you were assigned to those courses, the first and most enduring thing you discovered was that you would be learning them, not teaching them. That discovery was, I’m sure, what made so many on the Chicago faculty choose to/want to run them again themselves every year. Knowledge was not what an instructor came to these courses to deliver or what a student would be taking away. Trials of learning, the courses were designed to give and take habits of attention and ways of knowing as always also ways of unknowing. 

Truly, what else was even possible in a ten-week seminar that took up a sequence of works like the following: Genesis; The Peloponnesian War; Orestia; War and Peace; Trotsky’s The Russian Revolution. The next year the texts might swap out Genesis for the Gospel of Matthew; and/or Thucydides for Herodotus, Aeschylus for Plato, The Russian Revolution for The Education of Henry Adams (War and Peace was de rigeur). And in later years (after 1968) the last unit in the course often took up more current works like Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth or Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. That was Hum II.  Hum I was different though no less designed to make positive knowledge and academic expertise secondary concerns. In 1966 I was assigned a Hum I section where we were to wrangle major works of art, music and literature that appeared between 1848 and 1918.  But the object in Hum II would be the same in Hum I: to try to think about what you were doing accurately and to try to discuss what you were doing clearly.

Was the “content” of those courses important?  Yes, but rather in the way that Rilke let us know an archaic torso of Apollo might be important for an educational project like the Common Core.  An archaic torso like War and Peace or The Peloponnesian War were there to watch and watch over your helpless seeing and to take the measure of your cultural longings: “denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht”.  That’s why, each year and each term, these courses would turn out, as Gertrude Stein might say, “beginning again and again”. Because each year, each term, we would be called to reprise the event of the previous years in, so to say, a new key or new arrangements.  We reprised: that’s to say, everyone in those classes, where the distinction between instructor and instructed was constantly being turned around.  When you graduated or, like myself, left Chicago, what many of us came away with was the ethos of the Common Core.

CI was born from that splendid educational ethos. 

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Jerome McGann is professor emeritus of English at the University of Virginia. He is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry and has published many articles in the journal.

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[1] Burke’s “dramatic” schema for parsing symbolic action and his reflections on Language’s negative spaces (“motivated” and “spontaneous”) are pervasive.  Part III of Language as Symbolic Action is probably the single best place to watch him “in action” – that is, to follow what he is doing in saying what he says.  And while as a negative dialectician (like Nagarjuna) he never explicitly wrote that A = A iff A ≠ A, that seems to me the premise underlying all of his work. 

[2]  That was the title of the polemical set of essays collected and edited by Ronald S. Crane.

[3] Jerome McGann, “Neo-Aristotelian Versus New Critical:  A Study in the Nature of Critical Disputes” (master’s thesis, Syracuse University, 1961).

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND THANKS

Michael Fried

I’ve counted them up and it turns out I’ve published nine articles in CI along with several responses to critics.  The earliest of the articles, on Courbet’s After Dinner at Ornans and Stonebreakers, appeared in 1982; those that followed discuss Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846, Almayer’s Folly and other fictions by Joseph Conrad, Manet in his generation, Caravaggio, Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and Jeff Wall’s photograph Adrian Walker, Artist . . . in the light of a fascinating passage from Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value.  Before discovering CI (indeed before CI) I was at a loss.  From the start of my career as an art historian, such as it was in those early days, I realized that nothing I was likely to write would ever be acceptable to an “official” journal of art history like The Art Bulletin or The Burlington Magazine.  For one thing, I couldn’t operate rhetorically without the first person, an absolute no-go in those distinguished organs.  And for another, my whole style of argument, the claims I was making about Manet and his citations from previous art or the primacy of considerations of beholding and theatricality in Diderot’s criticism and the art of David and his successors, or (especially) my conviction that Courbet’s realism is to be understood as the product of an attempt by the artist to paint himself “all but corporeally” into his paintings were too foreign to the norms of the field to be taken seriously, much less find their way into such publications.  I did take advantage of my friendship with Phil Leider, then editor of Artforum, to publish in that unlikely venue both “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1959-1865” and “Thomas Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in 19th-Century Painting” in 1969 and 1970 respectively, but for obvious reasons that was hardly an ideal solution.  But in 1969 and 1970 CI didn’t yet exist, so what was one to do? 

I’m not certain about this, but my intuition is that what made my CI possible, and in time comparable journals like Representations, was the widespread use of photo offset lithography, which meant that illustrations became feasible without having to engrave a plate, with all the expense that the latter course of action entailed.  And starting in 1979 CI was edited by Tom Mitchell, whose dissertation and first book was on William Blake’s “composite art” and who would go on to write on a host of visual subjects in the years to come.  I had met Tom, who made it clear that he would welcome submissions from me, and starting with my writing on Courbet I took maximum advantage of this.  And of course publishing in CI meant not only getting one’s work into print but also reaching an audience not confined to the narrow and repressive field that art history then was, a liberation I found intoxicating.  Simply put, my career, such as it has been, owes a huge debt of gratitude to CI and its editors, Tom and Joel Snyder above all, a debt I am glad to have this opportunity to acknowledge.

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Michael Fried is is the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Art History at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.

The Origins of Critical Inquiry

Catharine R. Stimpson

To steady my memories of the origins of Critical Inquiry in Chicago in the 1970s I consulted a magisterial book, John W. Boyer’s The University of Chicago: A History (2015). It reminded me of the acute, even dangerous, financial pressures on the university then and in preceding years. Yet, the university neither trashed nor forsook its devotion to intellectual excellence and the formidable activity of reason.
Indeed, had the faculty not recruited Sheldon Sacks from Berkeley in 1966? Shelly had earned his doctorate from Chicago but had left Illinois to build a superbly vibrant reputation as a scholar, critic, and teacher in Texas and California. Had the university not hired Morris Philipson, a well-regarded publisher, as the director of its historic university press in 1967? Serving until 2000, Morris would become the legendary model of a modern press director.

Sheldon Sacks

Moreover, had Morris not encouraged the career of Jean Sacks at the Press? A University of Chicago graduate, she immediately entered into what she would sardonically call her “suburban housewife period.” In 1962, as a “re-entry woman,” she returned to the university. An astute businesswoman who was alert to new intellectual developments, she became manager of the journals division and assistant director of the press. Jean had been divorced in 1965. Shelly’s first wife had died shortly after they returned to Chicago. In 1967, Jean and Shelly married.
In 1974, the press and Shelly and his colleagues, Arthur Heiserman and Wayne Booth, launched Critical Inquiry. Jean said that after she had overseen the birth of CI, she thought “we ought to be doing something for women.” She set out to find an editor and found me at a lunch table at Barnard College where I was helping to organize an early rendition of the “Scholar and the Feminist” conferences. Newly tenured in English at Barnard, I was living in a loft at 352 Bowery in New York. Jean asked around about me, decided to take a chance, and pluckily invited me to be the founding editor of an academic journal explicitly and unapologetically about women. The initial group of editors eventually called it Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. It appeared in 1975.
Because of Jean’s leap of faith, because of Morris Philipson’s support, and because my blueprint for a new journal with that perplexing name passed the stringent press vetting and approval process, I could enter the exhilarating world of Critical Inquiry. I could be in the company of such citizens of that world as Tom Mitchell and, later, Alan Thomas. I had never studied at the University of Chicago but had respected its aura of excellence.
Moreover, I immediately loved Shelly and Jean. When they came to New York, they would summon me up from the Bowery. I would put on one of my limited number of better outfits. We would dine in a fine restaurant. We talked. We gossiped. I would make my way back to the Bowery, a fortunate woman who learned quickly how limited her capacity for Martinis was. Shelly and Jean enjoyed their marriage; they were bon vivants with a conscience and a strong consciousness of the indispensability of ideas. We all cared passionately about our journals, every detail about them.
A few days ago, I reread Shelly’s editorial for the first issue of Critical Inquiry, “A Chimera for a Breakfast,” a reference to Oliver Goldsmith and the nature of good criticism. I saw, more deeply than ever, how much his hopes, and those of his coeditors, overlapped with mine for Signs—that it be a “reasoned inquiry into the human spirit,” that it be interdisciplinary, that it “formulate fruitful and exciting questions,” and then attempt to find the best possible answers to them.” CI and Signs had very different reasons for being but not that much of method.

Shelly also edited the first of the four essays I have published in CI, “The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein” (1977). I had stumbled into Stein scholarship during a year at Yale in 1975-76. He saw merit in my discoveries and interpretations. He also understood the promise of the emerging feminist criticism and women’s studies. Since then, CI has taken three more of my essays: “Zero Degree Deviancy,” an early theory about lesbian literature (1981); “Nancy Reagan Wears A Hat: Feminism and Its Culture Consensus,” deliberately sassy before the colon, more soberly explanatory after it (1988); and finally, “Texts in the Wind,” a proposal for six questions that CI should address in its next decades (2004). Glancing through these pages, I realize how much I wanted to push both myself and intellectual boundaries as I wrote for CI, but simultaneously, how bound I was to “reasoned inquiry.” That commitment cautioned me against talking through my hat.
Shelly was to die prematurely in 1979, a hard loss. Jean was to die in 1996 in Memphis, Morris in 2011 in Chicago. The invaluable criticism that CI has fostered helps to provide necessary equipment for mourning. Part of that equipment is to question, fruitfully, why some chimeras, the cruel bogey men and vicious phantasms, must wrench our most bitter griefs from us.

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Catharine R. Stimpson is a university professor and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science New York University. She is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.